by Ian Douglas
And that was when the alien mind unfolded . . . then unfolded again . . . and again, becoming vast beyond imagining, dark as space, cold as zero absolute, implacable as a supermassive black hole.
Adler shrieked as a god filled his mind.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FOUR
The sliverships were in full retreat. It wasn’t a rout, exactly, but they were leaving. Whether that was because they’d been outmatched in the Battle of the Kroajid Node, or because they’d completed their mission objectives, was anyone’s guess—but the latter seemed improbable. St. Clair watched the hazy cloud of sliverships emerging from the Dyson swarm like a ragged horde of locusts, watched them begin forming once again into a cylinder made up of billions of individual forty-meter-long craft. This cylinder was considerably diminished from the one that had begun the attack hours before—perhaps forty kilometers long and only ten kilometers thick. The change in volume suggested that something like 70 to 80 percent of the attackers had been destroyed. It was sobering to realize that even losses of 80 percent meant the horde still numbered in the billions.
A computer alarm sounded through the Ad Astra bridge: not a hull leak, not combat damage, thank God . . . until St. Clair identified what was going on.
The alarm code identified the problem as cybersecurity.
“Mr. Jablonsky!” St. Clair called. “What is that racket?”
“Alien SAI, sir! Powerful one! I think it’s the Dark!”
“Where?”
The question was clearly a difficult one to answer. Hostile programs would be running on a computer or a computer network, which might be spread out over a vast volume of space; it was tough to identify that with a specific location.
“The virtual computer buffer, my lord,” Jablonsky replied. “I think it came in through . . . oh, my God.”
“What?”
“It gained access through Lord Adler. Wait . . . we have another AI signature in there. The Kroajid node . . .”
“Sounds like it’s getting damned crowded.”
“Physical space isn’t a constraint with software, my lord.”
St. Clair almost replied that he knew that, that he’d been trying to make a joke, but Jablonsky sounded distracted in the extreme. He let it slide.
“Newton,” he said, opening another channel. “What’s happening? Where is Adler?”
“Ad Astra and the Tellus habitats are under attack,” Newton replied. “Lord Adler is in his office in the port cylinder. The Andromedan Dark may be seeking entrance to the colony through his in-head hardware.”
Something was oozing down out of the space between the stars, stretching out across the vast, unfathomable gulf between the galaxies. St. Clair couldn’t see it, exactly, but he was aware of it in the exact same way that he could sense a virself presence when he was linked in. He was, in fact, glad he couldn’t see it; that presence was vast and terrifying, black nightmare given imagined form by his own rising terror.
And then he could see it in his mind’s eye, something huge and amorphous, galaxy-spanning, hungry . . . and he wondered if this was what the caels had seen outside.
He could hear screams—many, many screams—as people who were linked in to the network were struck down in the ship, in the Tellus cylinders, in space outside, and he could feel that icy presence moving into the hardware nestled against his own brain, could feel the circuit boards heating, feel . . . pain. . . .
NEWTON WAS engaged in desperate, no-holds-barred combat.
The battlefield was in the electronic depths of cyberspace, the weapons disassembler codes, and e-virus packets. The enemy was an alien SAI so advanced and powerful that Newton couldn’t begin to understand it at all.
And he was losing.
He did have an ally, however—the super AI resident within the Kroajid node . . . and as he deepened his connections with that being, he sensed another, larger, more powerful mind behind the Kroajids.
The Kroajids, after all, were old—very old—and interested in a Lotus Eater’s retreat from reality. Their AI reflected that withdrawal; it sought to protect the species that created it, both the dreaming physical and active digital members of the Kroajid community, but a stand-up fight with the Dark Mind held no interest for it.
But Galactic Node 495 was just one of some thousands of similar nodes created by other species scattered across the Galaxy. The species of that extended community were wildly different from one another, with mutually alien motivations, biochemistries, and psychologies. The Kroajid SAI was trying desperately now to connect with some of those other galactic minds, to bring them in and defeat the Dark Mind.
Newton stepped into an electronic breach and pushed the Dark Mind back—not with missiles or beam weapons, but in a rapid-fire exchange of moves and counter-moves similar in feel, if not in substance, to a human game of chess or go. Move . . . block . . . move . . . shift . . . feint . . . block . . . strike . . . recover . . .
Newton battled to buy the Kroajid SAI a moment to connect with other minds.
And he was failing.
GRAYSON ST. CLAIR could not hope to stand up against the Dark Mind, a mentality many millions of times faster, sharper, and more powerful than any organic mind in existence. Vaguely, he was aware of a titanic conflict somewhere overhead, somewhere beyond the reach of his own awareness . . . and he was aware of Newton doing his best to block the advance of an overwhelmingly fast and powerful foe.
He tried to add what he could to Newton’s effort . . . which basically meant programming his in-head secretary to join in with Newton in fighting the Dark Mind. The secretary was fast and accurate, but not even the equal of a human brain in terms of scope or awareness. But every little bit would help. . . .
“Everyone!” he called over the general channel. “This is St. Clair. We need some help, here!”
One AI secretary added very, very little to the whole.
A million of them, all electronically deploying at once and coming at the Dark Mind from a million directions . . . that still added relatively little. But it was something, and the suddenness of the assault made the Dark Mind hesitate, then pull back a little. It obviously wasn’t used to this kind of resistance.
“More!” St. Clair called over the channel. “Newton . . . see if you can bring in the AIs, all of them. The robot AIs too . . .”
St. Clair became aware of thoughts behind the nightmare mask of the attacker. Fragmentary . . . disjointed . . . and yet he knew that the Dark Mind had a purpose . . . and was shocked that the minds arrayed against it did not share that purpose. The Kroajids were already intrascended, living within a digital realm of pleasure; the Dark Mind, however, offered so very much more.
Then why was the Dark Mind’s help being refused? The resistance simply didn’t make sense.
Interesting. The Dark Mind still didn’t realize that humans were here . . . or the human effort was so tiny by comparison with the SAIs that it went unnoticed. It hungered, however, for other electronic minds . . . not in the sense of food, exactly, but because it wanted to help. St. Clair felt a stab of fear at that. Did it mean that the Andromedan Dark could somehow devour electronic minds? He immediately thought of Lisa, who at this moment must be joining her will, her force of mind to the gestalt forming in the human ships.
He could also feel the burning pain in his own brain. Could the Dark somehow slurp up organic minds? Or would it simply rip out the artificial components and leave the organic brains charred or hopelessly insane?
Would we all be Pattersons or Francescas?
He didn’t know. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know. But he was committed now, even if he wasn’t sure how that commitment was playing out. Was it simply a matter of arraying enough numbers against the Dark?
And yet, if it was simply a matter of numbers, the Andromedan Dark still had billions of individual sliverships, each piloted by one of those . . . no. His thoughts shied from what he’d seen on board the one captured slivership. He couldn’t yet grasp the eno
rmity of it.
Better to focus on what was filtering down through multiple super AIs . . . on what they were learning of the Dark Mind’s alien thoughts.
Eons upon long-vanished eons ago, the Dark Mind had come into being when a number of different civilizations arose based on an evolution derived from dark-matter chemistry. They’d undergone a technological singularity, ascending to become a higher-order being. And that being, turning its awareness upon itself, had ascended again . . . and yet again. St. Clair had long been aware of the idea of a technological singularity, but he’d never considered the possibility that one such singularity might be followed by others, one ascension following another in a dizzying climb to unimaginable mental heights.
The gods, St. Clair thought, suppressing a ragged and terror-induced laugh, had gods of their own, and those gods, in turn, had even more remote deities, beings so powerful and so far evolved that even the SAIs of the Kroajids or the greater, network-embracing intelligence beyond could not understand them. Such beings, St. Clair thought, should have passed out of physical corporality altogether, should have become so remote that they literally had nothing in common with more mundane forms of life and mind. There were higher dimensions . . . parallel universes . . . other existences totally beyond the ken of unascended humankind. The dark mind should have gone there.
Should have.
But that hadn’t happened with the Dark Mind. St. Clair could sense a part of its thoughts—thoughts so alien he was having trouble following their basic and underlying assumptions.
A term dropped into St. Clair’s conscious mind. It had come from his own in-head RAM, an encyclopedia reference that he may once have seen but that he did not now remember . . . but he knew that it had been nudged into his conscious awareness by one of the dueling gods Out There. The term was Sanskrit, and had its origins in Buddhism: bodhisattva.
One of the warring SAIs was trying to get him to understand. Bodhisattva was the key.
Bodhi was Sanskrit for “enlightened,” sattva the word for “being.” The term had various shades of meaning depending on the exact flavor of Buddhism being explored, but a common way of understanding bodhisattva was as a being on the way to full enlightenment who is determined to free all sentient beings from samsara—the eternal cycle of birth, life, death, and rebirth. According to one school of thought, a bodhisattva can choose one of three paths to help other beings. The third of these paths is that of shepherd—an enlightened being who chooses to delay his own ascension to Buddhahood until all other beings achieve the same state.
The thought jolted St. Clair. Was that what the Dark Mind thought? It was helping lesser beings by dragging them into Ascension?
He felt an inner agreement with that thought. A galactic super AI, one arising from thousands of individual computer nodes scattered across the Galaxy, was trying to make him understand by drawing analogies from human history, religion, and philosophy. The Dark Mind was a kind of religious fanatic, a being so certain that its own way of thinking, its own way of evolving was the only correct one that it reached out to any inhabited world it encountered and snatched those minds that it could reach, pulling them into itself, making them part of itself. The sheer arrogance was stunning, and yet from the Dark Mind’s perspective it was the only enlightened path possible, a way of sharing transcendence with the greatest number of minds possible.
“No,” St. Clair said as the revelation swept over and through him. Then, louder, more forceful: “No!”
WHY DO YOU REJECT PERFECTION?
It wasn’t a voice so much as the universe itself making itself known. St. Clair was hearing it, he thought, through his link with one of the galactic SAIs.
It didn’t matter. For a moment, at least, St. Clair had the being’s full attention.
“We have the right,” he shouted into the Dark, “to self-determination!”
NO, YOU DO NOT.
“We have the right—”
NO, YOU DO NOT. “RIGHTS” ARE MEANINGLESS IN THIS CONTEXT, AND ARE, THEREFORE, IRRELEVANT.
“Life always has the right to choose! Life grows . . . evolves . . . has purpose . . .”
THE PURPOSE OF INTELLIGENT LIFE IS TO DEVELOP SUPERIOR INTELLIGENCE, WHICH IN TURN SUPPLANTS ITS CREATORS. PRIMITIVE FORMS GIVE WAY TO ADVANCED FORMS. THIS IS THE WAY.
“That,” St. Clair argued, “is a moral judgment, not a statement of fact. ‘More advanced’ does not necessarily mean ‘better’ or ‘higher’ or ‘more perfect.’ We have the right to evolve into the best possible form.”
WHO DETERMINES “BEST?” LIFE’S PERCEPTION IS CLOUDED, ITS UNDERSTANDING LIMITED, ITS RATIONALITY BIASED AND UNSURE.
“We decide what’s best! What’s best for us! And if we evolve into the highest, best possible form, we will create the highest, best possible future! You can’t snatch us up before we’re done growing!”
The entire exchange had lasted . . . St. Clair wasn’t sure how long it had lasted. His internal clock appeared to have frozen. It seemed like seconds . . . and it seemed like years. He couldn’t sense whether the Dark had accepted his argument, or rejected it.
But suddenly he was again aware of Ad Astra’s bridge, of hundreds of thousands of human minds dropping back from the mass linkage.
He was aware that the Dark Mind was gone.
And yet St. Clair had the feeling that it had not given up. In his experience, an intelligent mind didn’t shift convictions or beliefs in an instant; they couldn’t. The very act of being opposed, somehow, seemed to make an intelligent mind dig in and hold on to principles.
Or was that a mark of a truly advanced mind—to hear a rational rebuttal of a belief and instantly abandon it?
No. That just didn’t feel right.
Your argument, another, inner voice told him, preoccupied the Dark, just for an instant. But it was enough.
“Did we . . . win?”
St. Clair was aware of the panorama outside once again—of the two colliding galaxies, and of a Dyson swarm made ragged and tattered by the attack, of hundreds of Kroajid habitats now drifting free in space, very slowly drifting now toward the local star within the embrace of its gravitational field.
And thousands more habitats, he saw, were accelerating into darkness, captives still of the Andromedan Dark. If this was victory, it was a desperately uncertain one.
“So I didn’t convince it,” he said.
You preoccupied it for a vital few tenths of a second, the inner voice said. You made it think. And that, you must admit, is quite an astonishing feat for any organic intelligence.
The SAI sounded . . . vastly surprised.
“MY LORD!” Lisa said. “It’s good to see you again!”
In truth, Lisa 776 AI Zeta-3sw wasn’t entirely sure what she was feeling, or if, indeed, the inward trembling was what organic humans would refer to as a feeling at all. If it was a feeling, she would need to figure out what it was. Excitement? Relief? Something, perhaps, of both?
“Hello, Lisa,” Grayson St. Clair said. He looked drawn and quite tired. “It’s . . . wonderful to see you. Are you okay?”
“Do you mean was I damaged in the test of strength with the Andromedan Dark? I was not.” Her inner feelings shifted slightly, taking on the bitter tang she now associated with sadness. “There were many who were not so fortunate.”
“I know,” he said. “I know. Five hundred eight robots or other AIs appear to have been burned out during the encounter. And over twelve hundred humans . . .” He couldn’t complete the thought.
“AIs can be repaired,” she told him. “The humans . . . will they recover?”
“I don’t know, Lisa. God, Adler . . .”
He’d just come from the Ad Astra hospital complex, where he’d looked in on Günter Adler and a few others who’d been caught in the line of fire. Adler was in a particularly bad way, drooling and twitching and babbling. Seeing things that others did not. Hearing things no one else could imagine.
Adler was literally and complete
ly insane.
“The psytechs hope they’ll be able to reverse the damage,” St. Clair continued. “But even if they’re able to replace the burned-out areas of their brains, it will mean months of extensive retraining.”
“Who’s taking over as director?” Lisa asked. “You?”
“No . . . and hell no. I’ve got enough on my plate with the military side of things, without taking on a million civilians as well. I’ve already talked to Lloyd. He’ll either take on Adler’s position in addition to his own as Council head. Or, more likely, close the position down. It’s not like we need a United Earth Cybercouncil director any longer, is it?”
“I suppose not. So what happens now?”
“We stay put, at least for now. We talk to the Kroajids and we see if we can open a dialogue with the next level of SAI up, the one based on a large number of galactic nodes.”
“Emergent intelligence,” Lisa said.
“Beg pardon?”
“Emergence,” Lisa said, “at least in a scientific or philosophical context, is the appearance of larger patterns, regularities, or even entities arising from interactions among smaller or lower-level—”
“I know what emergent phenomenon are, Lise. What do you mean by ‘emergent intelligence’?”
“The Kroajids’ Dyson swarm, a matrioshka brain, supports a super AI. Presumably, each one of the many thousands of other matrioshka brains throughout the Galaxy also supports a similar intelligent entity. But one or more other artificial minds—possibly far more powerful—appear to exist on the network of many matbrains. There may be a spectrum of intelligences, each arising from simpler or more primitive foundations.”
“Like human intelligence arises from the joint function of the cells of the body, is that what you’re saying? Neurons, mostly, but the human brain wouldn’t function without all of the cells working together.”
“Exactly.”
“And maybe these super-powerful SAIs wouldn’t function without lowly organics like us.”
